Over the past 7 years, we have been working with EY to support our joint mission to find diverse talent, with particular focus on their goal to improve hiring for “hard-to-fill” graduate vacancies. 

One of EY’s key focuses as part of this mission was to improve brand awareness and build their brand within the student population, particularly to champion diversity by reaching out to applicants of underrepresented groups within the organisation, such as women and those with black heritage. Indeed, this mission is at the core of EY’s culture to ensure equality within their recruitment process. 

As EY put it, “Diversity and inclusiveness are not ‘nice to haves.’ They are business imperatives.” 

To support their ‘business imperative’ to empower the workforce of tomorrow, Bright Network have been working with EY to achieve: 

• Accessibility and inclusivity for all recent graduates
• Upskilling and meaningful engagement
• Personalised and exemplary experiences for every candidate
• Build on opportunities for underrepresented groups, including to strive for a 50/50 male and female ratio

In order to drive results, together we have worked on a number of projects and campaigns as part of our long-standing partnership: From supporting the application process, providing targeted multi-channel campaigns within our membership of 600,000+, to working together on Internship Experience UK. Here is just some of the impact as a result of the partnership: 

• Successful fast-track campaigns which have seen a 20% conversion from initial assessment to hire, demonstrating the success of our targeted approach
• Thousands of students have completed EY’s ‘learning about strengths’ Bright Network Academy module, which has helped boost their employability
• This year, EY has received 15,000 applications and have made 380 offers
• This included 46% of applicants that were female, and 11% from black heritage

In order to achieve these results, we take a hyper-targeted and personalised engagement approach with students and recent graduates. This involves proactively surveying and monitoring sentiment amongst students and recent graduates, providing a real-time view into how to best engage and support different groups of students. As an example, our most recent research revealed that 42% of black heritage students felt that their background has hindered them in an application process and nearly a third of state school students felt the same.

Once candidates are in Bright Network and EY’s process, we hold weekly reviews to understand the number of candidates at each stage and to assess conversions. We can therefore identify gaps or conversion issues, enabling our team to provide coaching calls to support candidates, preparing them for each step.

A real-time dashboard provides the project team with conversion insights at a granular level – across each pipeline stage and segmented in areas such as race, background or degree type, to ensure no candidate is being unfairly disadvantaged.

This partnership is fuelled by data and real-world insights into the student and graduate population. In turn, these results highlight the sector-leading change in hiring for hard-to-fill roles with diverse young talent - this is at the heart of Bright Network’s mission and we’re excited to continue working with EY to enhance inclusivity, especially as we enter a ‘new normal’ going into 2022.